Sunday, 27 May 2012

Does Anyone Know...

...what happens to the pictures on my blog if I delete them from my Picasa album?

Here is the problem:
This morning, I started to write about Newby Hall, and of course have plenty of pictures to illustrate the post.
But I can't upload any of them, because apparently I am already using 99% of the storage space on my Picasa album.

Now, of course I could buy more storage space - but I am unwilling to do that.
I also could simply work with links to my photobucket album, but that would mean a post composed of text and links for you to click on, and thus a less nice-looking post and less comfortable looking at the pictures for you.

So, I am thinking about deleting the oldest pictures on my post, but I won't do that if it means those pictures will completely disappear from the blog.

Does anyone know?

Your help is much appreciated; I have already been browsing blogger help but couldn't find this information anywhere.

UPDATE: I don't know why, and I certainly have not changed any settings or anything about the pictures, but all of a sudden, blogger has decided to let me upload my pictures again. Ah well, the wonders of modern technology...

Unfortunately I think it's the only way, Meike. Last November I unwarily deleted from Picasa what I thought of as a duplicate of my profile picture, only to find that it instantly disappeared from all my previous comments to be replaced by a white exclamation mark in a black box. I reloaded the picture to my profile and all was well from then on but the exclamation marks are still there in the older comments.

There are plenty of anguished complaints in the help forums from people who didn't understand the link between Picasa and their blogs and deleted photos from Picasa only to find them irretrievably vanishing from their blogs. For those who haven't a copy elsewhere it means that the photos are gone forever.

I don't know what size your photos are, but Google is now recommending that images shouldn't be more than about 600 pixels wide and I always drastically shrink mine before uploading them to my blog. None of the photos on my blog are more than 100Kbs and most are closer to 50 or even less, but I think they still look fine.

I doubt it's much consolation, but you're the second blogger I follow to have this happen in the past couple of months.

Thank you, Perpetua, for having taken the time to explain this to me; while you were typing this, I was updating my post - it seems to work just fine again, without me having deleted anything or changing the size of my pictures.

I can only advise the same as Perpetua - to ensure your images are not too big in the future. So far I've had no trouble but it has always been a concern of mine since I'm up to 2330 posts on just one of my blogs!

I got into trouble with my Picasa album being nearly full after about two years of blogging; and yes if you delelte photos in the album they will no longer be visible on your blog. I wasn't able to solve the problem back then and I wasn't willing to pay either so I took the trouble of starting over my main blogs in a new account and leave the old ones as they were. Starting over inevitably means losing followers for the statistics though - even if the ones really actively following will most likely take the trouble and update their links etc.

Later on I went back to investigate and found that yes, size does matter, and so does having photos clickable, which means double copies of each photo in the album. When I removed the extras, that freed up a lot more space - but then the photos can no longer be enlarged by clicking. I had to do this individually with each photo - and also be careful which copy it was I deleted; so it was a time-consuming business.

Now I prepare all my posts in Windows Live Writer which automatically shrinks the size of the photos. I also usually choose not to have photos clickable. I've been blogging on for 1½ more years in the new account and still only using 9,1% of the space there.

Here is a link that I think explains it:Free Storage LimitsPhotos up to 800 x 800 pixels and videos up to 15 minutes don't count towards your free storage. When you reach your storage limit, any new photos you upload to Picasa Web larger than the free size limit will be automatically resized to 800 pixels (on their longest edge). - This is probably why you can still post although you've reached the storage limit.

Thank you for explaining, Monica!The strange thing is that, before I'd posted this, I was not able to upload any picture, but then, when I started to write my next post, suddenly it worked again. So why didn't "it" resize my pictures automatically before, but instead blocked them from uploading? And then all of a sudden "it" decided to resize them? Anyway - it works now, and that is what counts :-)

Looks like that page may have been updated recently. It seems that if you have signed up to Google+ then, and I quote, "Photos up to 2048 x 2048 pixels and videos up to 15 minutes won't count towards your free storage."

What I don't understand is why if you haven't signed up for Google+ you are still limited to photos of up to 800 x 800. Seems a bit odd to me.

The whole incident was odd, because after I was unable to upload my pictures for a bit, some half hour or hour later it worked perfectly alright again - without me having changed anything about my account or its settings. And no, I am not on Google+.Ah well, I am inclined now to just put it down as one more buggish event on blogger, but will watch the size of my photos more carefully from now on.

I've also noticed that when I use a picture on Blogspot that I have used before on Blogspot, it is added to Picasa...so in some cases, I have several copies of the same picture taking space in Picassa. On the other hand, if I delete one or two of them, they disappear from the blogs they were in. And, of course, it would be a huge undertaking -- not worth the time -- to go back in and clean everything else. Piccasa (I've spelled it three different ways now, so one must be right) is a clever marketer -- once you run out of space you have little choice but to pay for more. I now make my pictures as small as possible.

The other point to mention is that only photos added to a blog and hosted via picasa end up being available as a post thumbnail. This means that if you host your photos somewhere else then anyone who has your blog in a blog list gadget etc. will only ever see the title and not a thumbnail. I'm also guessing (although I haven't checked) that the popular posts gadget also wouldn't show thumbnails if the images aren't on picasa.